BERLIN – A German regional criminal police force said on Monday that three former members of the disbanded leftist militant group Red Army Faction were believed to be in hiding in Spain, Italy or France.

Ernst-Volker Staub, Burkhard Garweg and Daniela Klette are linked to a string of armed robberies carried out in Germany over the course of 30 years and were former members of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, a far-left group that carried out bombings, assassinations, robberies and kidnappings between its foundation in 1970 and its official disbandment in 1998.

The investigation into the three had been reopened in 2015, when DNA evidence gathered after several failed attempts to rob armored cars carrying money was found to match evidence from a 1993 RAF attack on a prison in Weiterstadt (Hesse).

In 2016, Dutch authorities were warned that the three fugitives were suspected to have fled to the Netherlands.

The Lower Saxony regional police office (LKA) said they were now certain that the trio had fled Germany and was now in the Mediterranean region, probably in Italy, Spain or France, and possibly counted with logistical support from former members of the Basque separatist terror group ETA or the Italian Red Brigades, a left-wing paramilitary organization.

The LKA released a series of images to help identify Staub, Garweg and Klette, including security footage of an armed robbery and of two of them riding a bus and buying a cell phone which was allegedly used in another robbery.

The last robbery they were linked to was carried out in June 2016 against an armored vehicle and a store by two men and a woman armed with a bazooka and automatic weapons.

The three are believed to have turned to non-terror-related crimes after the RAF disbanded in 1998.

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